


Evening Three

by Siria



Series: Nantucket AU [62]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-04-13
Updated: 2008-04-13
Packaged: 2017-10-03 20:23:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The day after, John comes home from work with that restless, irritable feeling in his chest that he knows from long experience is a sure arbiter of a bad mood later on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Evening Three

**Author's Note:**

> A belated gift for Jenn, on her birthday. Thanks to Cate for betaing.

The day after, John comes home from work with that restless, irritable feeling in his chest that he knows from long experience is a sure arbiter of a bad mood later on. The wind's still kicking up outside, but the weather's grown warm enough that when he stomps up the stairs, kicking off his boots as he goes, he's sweaty as well as dirty and tired and grumpy. Just late enough in spring, too, that there's still light for him to see by in the stairwell, light that shows how he can barely lift his feet high enough to clear each step.

When he stumbles into their bedroom, he flops down onto the unmade bed with outstretched limbs. The striped sheets are rumpled and worn-soft against his cheek, and his burning eyes are already drooping closed. Yesterday and the day before had been two long days, days spent fighting the wind that normally worked with him so well, bore him up. He'd long since burned through his supplies of adrenaline, and a day like today—a long, drawn-out come-down, everything a reminder of what had happened, what _could_ have happened—working on the plane from sunrise to make sure that he'd done no damage to her; dealing with incident report paperwork that defied Rodney for verbosity and incomprehensibility; ignoring a snot-nosed brat of a client who didn't understand why it was impossible for John to fly from Nantucket to the Hamptons faster than the goddamned Concord could have managed.

He's tired.

The bedroom is very quiet—its four walls hold nothing but the tick of the clock on the dresser, the gentle creak and settle of timbers in the attic overhead, the silent echoes of long-ago conversations—but John can hear, far below and muffled, the sounds of Rodney moving around in the kitchen. Dinner time, and the agitated rattle of pots and pans, and John knows Rodney has to have heard him come in, but there's no sound of feet stomping up the stairs. Probably he's distracted with some new proof. John could go downstairs to see, but he's tired and he's too borderline grumpy to inflict himself on someone else right now—even Rodney—and oh, _pillows_.

He lets himself sink into the mattress, as uncomfortable and orthopaedic as it is, and he's just starting to drift off to sleep when he hears Rodney come up the stairs as quietly as he can—which means, in real terms, that it sounds like a herd of baby elephants tip-toeing up the steps in stocking feet. John hears Rodney pause about half-way up to hiss something under his breath—probably at one of the kittens; it'll still be another little while before their collection of quarks are old enough to move on to their new homes, but they've already been around long enough to have learned the knack of getting under their feet at the worst moment—and John, eyes closed, feels his mouth curve up in a smile.

Tension fades gradually from his body breath by breath, a relaxing of stiff lines he didn't know his body could maintain, and he presses back a little when Rodney clambers onto the bed behind him: five feet ten inches of semi-retired physicist lying warm up against him in sweatpants and appropriated t-shirt and grubby white tube socks with a hole in one toe. Disregarding all of the warning signs John's body language is still conveying, Rodney is as casually entitled with John's body as ever, with all the movements of his limbs going effortlessly beyond all the boundaries John has ever set for himself. Lying there in the evening light, with Rodney's mouth pressed against the nape of his neck, Rodney's arm slung over his stomach, Rodney's legs tangling with his, the soft swell of Rodney's cock pressed up against his ass, John thinks back to all those long months ago, and struggles to remember how he could ever have thought he didn't want this.

"Bad day?" Rodney mumbles, bookending his words with dry kisses to the notch of a vertebra.

"Why'd y'say that?" John drowses wryly, his body growing ever more lax with touch after so long without.

"Because," Rodney says, "I was cookin' when y'came in, and y'always make that horrible honey-I'm-home gag when I cook. 'Less y'grumpy." John huffs out a laugh, partly because it's true, and partly because he thinks that only with Rodney is he this transparent.

"Long," John explains. "Camshafts. Forms. Harpies."

"Oh," Rodney says, this time nipping at the delicate skin of John's nape, working slowly and methodically, as if to see if there's a difference in John's reaction between a bite _here_ and a lick _there_, as if he's fascinated with this one small part of John as much as he is with the whole. "Well, harpies. Course," as if he understood John perfectly. And maybe he did, because it seems like he knows exactly what John needs.

With big, careful hands, he turns John over onto his stomach, and John goes without complaint. He buries his face against the pillow that smells like Rodney, and tries very hard not to inhale as if it's been years, and he's been missing Rodney forever—not when Rodney's right behind him, settling himself astride John's thighs, with his hands warm along the broad planes of John's shoulder, the draped curve of his spine. He relaxes into Rodney's touch, certain that he knows where this is going—the delicious massages that he can coax Rodney into giving only rarely, but which Rodney always does well, trading on a skill learned in grad school and honed over the long, tense nights of a Siberian winter—the press of thumbs into the tense muscles under John's shoulder blades, the flat palms of his hands bleeding heat into John's shoulders. Simple touch that can lull into sleep, and let him wake the next morning refreshed and revived, alive down to the tips of his toes.

But Rodney's nothing if not full of surprises; and though John's t-shirt and his beige sweater get rucked up under his armpits, his cargo pants and his boxers are pulled down to tangle around his thighs. John makes a sleepy little noise, not of complaint, but of query—he's never objected to jumping into the unknown in this life, has done it feet first even when he's not known where he's going to land, but he generally likes to know why he's jumping in the first place, and this is not standard operating procedure for a massage. John moves a hand back to touch him, but Rodney doesn't let him: he takes hold of both John's hands and moves them both until they're tucked away beneath John's chin.

"Shh," he says, "Just let me."

John breathes out, and goes with it, trusting to whatever Rodney's hands hold for him, and there's a stutter to his exhale at the first brush of Rodney's lips against the curve of his spine, at the way Rodney's big hands stroke up and down John's sides, as if he's soothing a startled animal, gentling it down. John shudders.

Slow and slow, and Rodney's showing no sign of getting distracted from the path he's chosen for himself. He varies his wet, lush kisses with the scrape of his teeth and the tip of his tongue, yes, but he's still following the line of John's spine, down and down, and just as he reaches the curve of John's ass, John realises what he's going to do. His hips buck, helpless, because they hardly ever do this, and he's sweaty and unshaven and dirty and— "_Jesus_!" Rodney's hands move down to curve around his hipbones, and the bastard's stronger than he looks, because he has John pinned, pressed against the bed, and he can't move either forward into the sweet friction of the bed, or back against Rodney's mouth, to offer himself up.

Rodney misinterprets—says "John, no, I can make it good, honest, I—" But his babble dies away when John makes an impatient, hoarse noise low in his throat and reaches back with shaking hands to spread his own cheeks, to open himself up to Rodney. He lets his legs spread open against the cool cotton sheets in a way that can't be misunderstood, not at all, and John wonders if his cheeks have flushed as hotly red as they feel. Above him, he can hear Rodney's breathing shift register, coming hoarser and more ragged.

There's a swift inhale, like Rodney's about to say something, which is why John's unprepared for that first touch of Rodney's tongue against him, and his hips hitch, pushing him backwards. He squeezes his eyes shut tight against the sensation because god, _god_—it's wet and hot and so good, the scrape of Rodney's stubble against sensitive skin so overwhelming, and Rodney's humming like he's enjoying this, getting off on it. Like he's enjoying the way he's taking John down so thoroughly with little more than the flat of his tongue, like he's enjoying the bitter-salt taste of John's skin.

He whimpers, feeling his fingers tangle without conscious control in the sheets, and pushes back against Rodney's grip on his hips so that he can raise himself clumsily onto aching, ageing knees; his pants hold his legs closed just that little too much, he _wants_. "More," he pants, "More, Rodney, you son of a bitch, or I'll—"

Rodney's being infuriatingly patient, a quality he picked up god knows where because John can't remember him displaying it much before now, but it's definitely on show here: he runs his tongue from John's balls right up to the base of his spine with an infuriating lightness of touch, the barest flicker of wet sensation, and just when John's starting to quake with it, he pushes inside, all thick muscle and heat and distantly, John can hear himself chanting _yes, yes, yes._

Rodney's going for it now, fucking him with his tongue, hands splayed wide against John's ass and holding him open. It's dirty and the best kind of nasty, and through the fading shame that still comes with wanting this so much, that still lingers at the edges of this kind of loving, this kind of sex, for all that John's the far side of forty by now, John can feel nothing but a steadily building pleasure.

Harder and faster, and Rodney's jaw must be aching with it, but he keeps going, and _god, god, yes_, John throws his head back and pants, at the way Rodney's trying to _curl_ his tongue inside him, one hand sliding down to play with John's balls, which are drawing up higher and tighter, _jesus fuck_—and when Rodney pulls his tongue out abruptly, goes back to that tease of the tip of his tongue against the very edges of John's hole, just at the same moment that his free hand moves around to stroke John's hard and aching cock, John roars and comes so hard the bed shakes with the force of it, so loud that it's as if the whole house is being filled up with their pleasure.

John collapses down onto the ruined bedsheets, limbs weak and trembling with it, and he's exhausted and sated and sweating, and the smile on his face is broad enough that his cheeks hurt with it. Over and behind him, he can hear the sounds of skin on skin that means Rodney's jerking off.

"On me," he mumbles; then, in response to Rodney's little noise of enquiry, he says more loudly, "On me, come on me, please," accompanying his words with a little hitch of the hips, as if Rodney needs the encouragement. He hears Rodney make an aborted little whimper, like a cough choked off, and then he's coming all over John's back, warm and wet against skin that's already gilded with sweat. Just the thoughts of it, of what that must look like — what he must look like, sprawled there half-dressed on tangled sheets, used and worked open, like the worst kind of rough trade with Rodney's come spattered across his back — makes John moan hoarsely, and god, if he were twenty years younger, he'd already be hard again.

"Be the death of me," John says drowsily, shifting to roll onto his back, which is a mistake: it reminds Rodney of what had happened the day before yesterday. It sets him off on a rant about John's piloting skills and his disturbing resemblance to a bug near a shiny, shiny windshield, as full of outraged dignity as if he weren't kneeling on his bed in a come-spattered _Stewart/Colbert '08_ t-shirt with his dick hanging out of his pants, and later, John thinks he's perfectly justified to claim that it was all in self-defence, a pillow-fight that was merited, their laughter true and earned.


End file.
